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Key Takeaways
- LimeWire has acquired the Fyre Festival brand for $245,000, the companies announced this week.
- The file sharing service said it will release more details about its plans for the brand in the coming months.
- LimeWire was relaunched under new leadership in 2022 as a music-focused NFT and file sharing platform, and Fyre tried and failed to organize a second festival last year.
Two once-infamous brands are now set to collaborate after this nostalgic sentence became reality earlier this week: file sharing service LimeWire has acquired the Fyre Festival brand.
The companies announced the deal on Tuesday, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that the final sale for the Fyre Fest brand took place through eBay and the final price was just $245,000.
LimeWire Says Fyre Festival Brand Can Be Revived Just Like Its Own
LimeWire said that among it’s plans for the brand, it is “not bringing the festival back. We’re bringing the brand—and the meme—back to life. This time with real experiences, credibility, and (we promise) no cheese sandwiches,” a reference to the original Fyre Fest’s disastrous catering situation.
The file sharing platform said it has opened a waitlist and plans to share information about its plans over the next several months.
“We’re not here to repeat the mistakes—we’re here to own the meme and do it right,” COO Marcus Feistl said in a statement Tuesday. “Fyre became a symbol of everything that can go wrong. Now it’s our chance to show what happens when you pair cultural relevance with real execution.”
What Have LimeWire and Fyre Festival Been Up To Since You Last Heard About Them?
After becoming one of the most dominant file sharing services that helped people download music for free in the early 2000s, LimeWire shuttered in 2010 after a yearslong legal battle ended in a court siding with record labels and issuing an injunction against LimeWire. The company had to pay north of $100 million to the companies as restitution for revenue they lost out on as a result of consumers using LimeWire.
The LimeWire name was reborn in 2022, but with a different group of people leading a new product without the founder of the original service Mark Gorton. The new company was still focused on music, but in 2022 entered the corporate landscape as a file sharing service with an emphasis on music-related non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and it has since also launched its own cryptocurrency.
Fyre Festival, on the other hand, has its original founder involved in this new deal. After spending four years in prison on a fraud conviction following the original 2017 debacle that spawned documentaries from Netflix (NFLX) and Hulu, Fyre co-founder Billy McFarland was released in 2022. He tried to relaunch the brand with a new festival in Mexico in 2024 before the plans fell apart, per the WSJ.
Earlier this year, McFarland announced that he was selling the intellectual property (IP) of Fyre on eBay, and the Journal reported that the LimeWire team was in talks to acquire the brand before the auction launched, and instead successfully bought the brand when that deal fell through. Just ahead of the deal’s announcement, McFarland promoted a Visa (V) ad on social media voiced by Ryan Reynolds that references the original Fyre Festival, and a musical about the brand and McFarland’s story is reportedly set to be directed by “Thor: Ragnarok” director Taika Waititi.
